The foundation of business built on Google approved

There are three ways to get cracking with this:

1. Set up your Google My Business profile This is important and the service is free to use. By signing up to Google My Business you can tell Google directly the name of your business, the exact location, what it does, opening times, what it looks like (upload your own images), and many more attributes.

It is of particular relevance to the map results and the 3-pack listings. For instance, Google smartly tells the searcher whether the business is open or closed right now and pulls out images to give users more of an idea of what to expect. Not only does Google My Business make it easier for it to know what’s what about your business, it also improves the search experience for your customer – giving more ‘at a glance’ information than the traditional SERPs listings do.

Google My Business also allows you to post updates to give customers an idea of current offers and events direct from the search results. And you can also make use of the insights and analytics to give you an idea of how well your hyperlocal visibility is working.

Use Google Analytics to measure behavior across websites, apps, and devices to make better, data-driven decisions.

2. On-site content should reflect hyperlocal terms As Nikolay Stoyanov says in his Complete guide to keyword research for SEO: “Keywords are the backbone of SEO.” I’m inclined to agree. The keyword research methods and tools explored by Nikolay in his above piece are invaluable, but hyperlocal search terms also need to draw on knowledge and potentially research of the area in which your business is located.

Neighbourhoods and boroughs of wider cities are good places to start. Where is your business located in this sense, and what does Google display when you search for it? Is it worth zooming in smaller? Like my above example, ‘mutley plain,’ is a well-established street within Mutley in Plymouth. Are you located near a well-known place or landmark (university, sports stadium, monuments etc.)? It might be worth reflecting this in your onsite content.

Once you’re sure of your hyperlocal term, make sure it is reflected in your titles, descriptions, body text, alt. text of images etc. so when Google crawls this content – and potential customers read it – both know your business is there.

3. Add structured data markup (schema) Google offers further information on how best for local businesses to do this here. By including the relevant markup, you can make Google’s job of displaying the necessary information and call-to-actions about your business even easier.

Currently Google accepts markup for (among other things): Opening Times. Even down to seasonal changes Location. Including latitude and longitude Restaurant-specific properties. Such as food served, how it can be delivered, how to reserve a table etc. Consider adding markup to the content pages on your site as a best practice accompaniment to the information in your Google My Business profile. It will ensure that when Google is crawling your site, it will deliver the most trustworthy, up-to-date and relevant information. (Listing errors are costly for business)

Nearly 75% of people lose trust in brands with inaccurate business listings.

Thinking about your business in hyperlocal terms is a good opportunity to stand out. As increasing numbers of web searchers use mobile devices to look for businesses, there is more reason for Google to have an understanding of what relevant businesses are within walking distance of those making the search. At the same time, hyperlocal terms can be expected to be used more often.

Additionally, be sure to analyze the success of your hyperlocal search terms (using Google My Business, Google Analytics etc.) and tweak them if necessary. Be prepared for such terms to increase in competitiveness and for Google to change how it presents its local and hyperlocal results.

No matter what kind of business you are in, you need to optimize for local search.

Local search is one of the last great untapped resources of search engine marketing and optimization

… and if you can ensure that you are leading on local search you are going to end up with a huge audience. So, how do you do that?

There are several things that you can do to optimize your business for local SEO. Here are some tips.

Claim your business listing. You would be surprised how many businesses fail to complete this one, very simple step. If you want Google to list you locally, you need to let them know that you are there. Make sure that you are claiming your business listing for each of your locations.

Next, you want to be consistent. Having the same business name, address and phone number across the entire internet will be much more effective and inspire trust, plus, the local SEO bots will not get confused by conflicting information and categorize you incorrectly.

Make sure that you choose the right categories for your business. Most businesses will easily fit into a single category, but some will need more than one. You want to make sure that you know what categories you are listed in.

Make sure that you use citations. Citations are places around the web where you can list your business – to “prove” to Google that the information is correct. Not only will this give you credibility with Google and consistency with customers, but it will also give your website an SEO boost if you are linking back to your website. Some of the citation websites that you can lose include the Better Business Bureau, the Chamber of Commerce in your local city or town, any associations that you are a member of, any industry groups that maintain directories and pretty much anywhere else that you can think of.

Get reviews and testimonials and make sure they are posted on visible sites.It goes without saying that we’re talking about positive reviews here. Websites like Yelp, Angie’s List, Google reviews and other sites that are listed fairly high in the search engines can make a pretty significant impact on how your customers see you and whether they buy from you. Everyone uses reviews these days to make buying decisions.

GOOGLE MY BUSINESS

Google My Business is an online directory that holds hundreds of thousands of different business listings. But it’s not just any online directory. Many consider it to be the best because it’s run by the mega magnate Google, and millions of people perform searches on Google every day. Of course there are other search engines, and many of them are very useful and are also used by consumers every day. But there’s no doubt that Google is the biggest, so when they offer free marketing to business owners, why wouldn’t they take it?

And along with finding the information they were looking for, consumers can also see a description of your business, photos, videos, and reviews that will be just as effective as personal recommendations. The customer will have so much more information than they would get by just calling you.

Google My Business makes you more visible to customers even when they are on the street, right in the same neighborhood as your business.

To learn more about Google My Business and how to set up your business profiles correctly, see the business listing secrets get the step by step instructions here.

The online reputation of your business hinges on a variety of elements.

It’s an ever-evolving digital mix-up of comments, reviews, blogs, and more. It’s time to take a proactive approach to improve your online reputation. Not sure where to start?

Here are 12 tips to make your business shine under any consumer microscope.

1. Upgrade your Trustpilot account – Trustpilot continues to sway consumers, and you probably have built up a few Trustpilot reviews for your business. But are you making the most of your Trustpilot account? By upgrading your Trustpilot account from free to paid, you get more personalized features to net more ratings and reviews.

Paid Trustpilot features include:

Personalized email address from sender

Customizable review invitations to your customers

Rich snippet star rating in Trust Box

Trust Box optimization – Imported product reviews

Trustpilot paid features can make a big impact on your brand reputation.

After all, reviews and ratings play a big role in consumer confidence to buy

2. Get backlinks from high authority sites – A backlink from a high authority publication is a recommendation signal to consumers. For example, people reading a Forbes article on “Best Health Apps” will assume that the Forbes journalist did his or her due diligence in finding the very best apps. This is a trust signal for consumers. To get those high authority backlinks you can implement a link building strategy that allows you to be top of mind for journalists. Creating very shareable content on your blog or site is also a powerful way to earn those reputation building backlinks as well.

3. Have a “featured in” logo section – To amplify confidence to buy and boost your brand reputation, you can showcase the high authority publications your products or services have been featured in. This makes a ‘Featured In’ section on your home page valuable, like this one from Your Doctors Online. This reputation strategy tip is also a very easy one to implement once you have three or more high authority publications to list. You can also use the press release strategy to develop a few high authority “Featured In” publications. Using PRNewswire, iReach, WebReach, you can launch a press release about your brand. The press release will get picked up by a number of high authority publications, like Yahoo Finance. You can create a press release about a new product or service, new employee position, charity work, and more.

4. Get quoted everywhere! Having a CEO, director, or manager quote in several publications can be another fantastic reputation strategy. This will compliment your link building strategy as well, since most quotes are accompanied by a link back to the experts business. How do you get quoted everywhere? Well, it is actually easier than you may think. Using Help A Reporter Out (HARO) can accomplish this. Simply sign up for a free account as a “Source,” fill in the information, and choose the industries you can add insights for. This is a great way to boost your reputation as an authority in your industry. You will also get quality backlinks to your website, and use articles on social media to boost awareness and trust among your followers.

5. Facebook video ads – Video ads are trending in a big way for brands, and users want more videos than ever before. In fact, 90 percent of users said that videos are a big part of the decision process. Social media videos net 1,200 percent more shares than the average text social posts. “It is indeed one of the best tactics to bring more exposure to your brand while helping you achieve your bottom-line,” Mike Templeman of Forbes explained. Facebook video ads are among the best performers. Why video? Video is great for engagement and can also add that personal touch consumers want.

Like this video from Backlinko’s Facebook page with nearly 3,500 shares: You can show your social audience that you are indeed real, knowledgeable, and highlight your brand’s value and benefits.

6. YouTube videos – Your social media videos will often come from YouTube, making this is another reputation strategy worth pursuing. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world and you can highlight your authority and expertise via YouTube videos quite easily.Going back to the previous Backlinko example, Brian Dean uses YouTube videos to showcase his expertise on digital marketing in an engaging and actionable way. If you want to increase your reputation and become a thought leader in your industry, YouTube can be valuable. You can also build up a subscriber base to remarket to.

7. Collaborate with social media influencers – There is nothing like boosting your reputation through the recommendations of influencers your customers already trust. This makes social media influencers an important asset to add to your reputation strategy. Did you know that 74 percent of people turn to social media for help with buying decisions? And 40 percent of people have made an online purchase after seeing an influencer use a product on social media. Where can you find social media influencers to help improve your brand reputation? There are a few online platforms like FameBit, TapInfluence, and Traackr. FameBit is a free platform that allows you to connect with influencers in a variety of industries. Since it is free, it’s a good way to test the social media influencer waters across social channels like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

8. Get more blogger reviews – Social media is not the only place to utilize the power of influencers. If your brand sells products, getting more reviews from bloggers people follow and trust can boost your brand reputation. To get your products reviewed by influential bloggers, you will need to send them a quick pitch. This can be via a social media message, or through their email or contact form from their website.

Here are a few pitch tips for outreach:

Keep your pitch short and sweet

Highlight your product’s benefits

Explain why the blogger’s audience will like your product

Let the blogger have your product for free

Let them know you have an influencer marketing budget

9. Start a podcast – Another great way to improve your reputation strategy is to start a podcast. Podcasts help showcase your knowledge and can cover a lot of trending topics your customers want information about. “If you’re not already engaging your target market with podcasts, prepare to launch your first piece of audio content,” Tyler Basu explained in an Entrepreneur article. Podcasts are a great way to feed information to your audience. They can easily listen to your podcast while driving, at the gym, on the bus or subway, and even at work. Your audience doesn’t need to focus all their attention on written content. Creating a podcast is also easier than spending hours developing a blog post.

A few podcast types include:

Interviews Solo podcasts – Two or more hosts

Narrative podcasts

Or a combination of the above

You will also need a separate hosting platform for your podcasts. LibSyn and Blubrry are two hosting platforms that are affordable and easy to use.

10. List your product on Amazon – Getting your product listed on Amazon is an exceptional way to boost your online reputation. Did you know that 80 percent of Amazon users make an average of one purchase per month? Given that there are around 300 million Amazon users in total, that’s a lot of potential customers – and reviewers. This makes Amazon a big trust builder for consumers and should be part of your reputation strategy. Amazon also has a product review and star rating. This can make a big impact on your brand’s reputation. Amazon listing guidelines are actually not as difficult as you may think. You will need to follow the step-by-step process and you could have your product on Amazon within a few weeks.

11. Create Quality Content – One tried and true method for improving your reputation strategy is to create quality content. Those 300 word blog posts will simply not do anymore. You want your audience to be engaged and learn something from your articles. Develop actionable blog posts that show step-by-step ways to solve issues consumers in your industry and niche may be experiencing. For example, if you are catering content to small businesses, you can have a post about email marketing

Social media isn’t just for collecting likes and follows: It can help you increase sales

If you want to gain the awareness and trust of the consumer, you have to be active on social media, however, knowing how to successfully manage a social media account does not come naturally.

Social media makes it easy to network and build relationships that make sales conversations warmer. Even better is how easy it is to find mutual connections through social media.

Take Social Media Marketing To A New Level

If yours is among the many small businesses that has taken advantage of everything social media marketing has to offer, then you might find yourself struggling to keep up at times. You might wish you had more hours in the day to accomplish everything you need to do plus stay on top of all the latest social media marketing trends.

The Problem: Keep Up With Demands

Just about two short years ago, social media marketing was a bit less complicated than it is now. Business owners felt they could manage everyday tasks plus keep up with their Twitter feeds and Facebook fan pages. Since social media has enjoyed such a boom, there are a lot more options for monetizing as well as expanding marketing opportunities. If you’re trying to do it on your own, you’re very likely feeling completely overwhelmed.

How to leverage social media to make money online

Social media is one among the biggest parts of creating wealth on-line, and every website you go to for im advice will tell you to apply social media. However in spite of all of that data available, people are still using social media incorrectly. In this article, we’re going to study a number of the great ways to use social media to make money on the net.

Use “Look-Alike” Ads: that is some thing that fb has began doing to make advertising extra powerful for their advertisers. Appearance-alike commercials are ads which might be particularly designed for a certain target audience. Those advertisements are matched with an appropriate client and designed in order that that consumer will respond to them.

Use Instagram Stories: Instagram Stories are one of the maximum social media websites of the contemporary age. Instagram is used by everybody due to the fact anybody takes pics, but corporations that integrate product photos with the instagram testimonies feature see a awesome deal greater engagement and achievement.

Use the Ad tool presented by using LinkedIn: this resume website online has a few quite great advertising tools, not to say plenty of groups and ways to target unique audiences. The ad tool are some thing exceedingly new and just one greater manner that linkedin is attempting to compete with some of the alternative social media networks available. Multiple examples include the ability to accumulate leads from the linkedin news feed and the ability to use retargeted ads.

Use YouTube to sell gated content: there are a whole lot of human beings that use youtube every day, and importing your motion pictures is a clever concept irrespective of what. But one of the ways that you can exceptional leverage youtube is to use films to attract in visitors for gated content material to your essential internet site. Due to the fact youtube is a part of google, there are loads of advertising rules that most of the people don’t even do not forget.

Use Facebook Groups: if you aren’t using facebook agencies to sell your business, you then are missing out on a massive function at the social media web page. Facebook organizations are designed to construct communities inside facebook and becoming part of a community manner which you have immediate rapport and affect with the humans inside that institution.

The Solution: Delegate

If you are tired of burning the candle at both ends, it’s time to do something about it. Hiring a company or individual who specializes in handling social media marketing for businesses can give you back some of those precious hours – last time I counted, there were still only twenty four of them in a day. By letting someone else wade through the heaps of information, manage your fans, friends, and tweets, upload your videos, and keep your blog moving, you can take back the hours you need to replenish yourself and truly enjoy your life more.

Tool(s) you use depends on your company’s infrasture and needs

We examine some methods and tools you can use to get more online reviews for your business. Here are but some ways you can use to start getting more reviews.Use them to build or leverage your reputation marketing efforts.

Post Cards:

1. Post cards remind customers of your services. People
sometimes get busy, and having a post card in hand may
just be the thing needed to get them to pick up the phone
and make that call, even if they don’t end up leaving a
review!

2. They promote your brand. Getting your brand out there
is the cost of doing business. A multi-modal approach
is usually best. Post cards are just one additional way
to promote your great brand!

3. They offer incentives to leave a review. Run a contest
on a monthly, quarterly or bi-yearly basis, etc. Give the
lucky winner products, free services or other great things
to get your regular patrons to post a review! Be sure to
include ‘one review per customer’ on your post card. For a
patron to participate, they must leave the review on your
personal review page. Let them know that leaving a review
on any of the listing directories will not enter them into the
contest.

Using Business Cards:

1. Get the next appointment! Before the customer leaves,
have your staff schedule the next appointment and
write the time on the back.

2. Ask the customer to go to the website listed on the card
(or scan the QR code if they have a smartphone) and
leave a review. If you are running a contest, have them mention this also.

3. Have a checkoff sheet for each staff member to help
keep track of how many business cards they handed out
each day. Having a checkoff sheet is a handy reminder to
get reviews until the process becomes a habit.

4. For clients who are particularly fond of the services
they get from a staff member, have staff give out a few business cards and ask the happy customer to pass them
along to two or three friends. Of course, if you have a
Facebook fan page, getting ‘likes’ is another great way to
let others know, too.

If it is the receptionist’s job to set appointments and
hand out appointment cards, have them ask for the review.

Using Emails:

Emails are easy ways to get reviews online. However,
remember to send them out in moderation. If you already
have an email database, you may want to send out an email
to your list for some immediate feedback – both positive and
negative! Remember, you want to be able to know what
negative things are happening in your business so you can
fix them.

Respond to negative reviews quickly. This shows the
customer you care. Once the issue is resolved, ask them
once again to post a review.

If you don’t have an email list, now is a great time to
start building one. Start collecting your customer’s emails
today!

Other Methods:

Include your review page URL address on the
sales receipt and have the receptionist point it out, asking
them to fill out the ‘survey.’

Place a countertop display with a QR code that takes
the customer to your personal review page. Have the
receptionist or staff member ask the customer to scan the
code with their smartphone and leave a review before they
leave your business!

The emergence of numerous review sites has created an unprecedented, ongoing online conversation about local businesses. The wise local business owner will monitor this dynamic conversation and join in when appropriate to earn loyalty and control damage.